About this Learning Community

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One of the most pressing issues of our time is the degradation of truth. This has far-reaching consequences from the manipulation of public opinion to destabilizing our democratic process. As part of this learning community we’ll explore how to train ourselves to tackle these challenges? Just as importantly, how do we prepare our students to navigate this world?

This Information Literacy curriculum will venture through fake news, social media, and data privacy. More critically, we’ll explore fact-checking, spotting fake websites and bots, while also questioning surveillance practices and the platforms we use to access and share information. As our journey will be difficult (not to mention potentially mentally and emotionally draining), we’ll be mindful of our personal state of minds and our shared humanity while we study our online environments and pursue tough questions.

Finally, in addition to these topics, this learning community will emphasize practical ways to impact our world. Consequently, part of our time together will be spend reflecting and publishing what we learn along our journey in the hopes to inspire others to tackle these issues and provide them with our perspectives what could improve our classrooms in this tumultuous time.

At the end of the day, we just want to make the world a better place. We hope you’ll join us for this 5-week journey as we explore practical ways to accomplish this goal!

Setup

Every week will focus on a particular topic that has a dedicated webpage (and can be accessed from the above menu). Each page will house the discussion content and any materials we’ll study that week. Extra materials will also be available if your interests inspire you to explore further.

Lastly, at the bottom of each page is a reflection form. This seeks to collect your thoughts and ideas from each week so they can be published in a quick guide that could be shared with other faculty. The objective is for participants to share any recommendations or ideas of how they plan to make their own classrooms better after studying the each topic. Imagine being able to hand a list of recommendations from a group of instructors about how they tackle fake news, fact-checking, or data privacy (etc.) in their classrooms. (Participation in this aspect of our learning community is not required, but is encouraged.) More details can be found on the reflection form of each page.

Please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email with any questions you have.

Open License

Much of the content that comprises this curriculum is from a variety of open sources. Please refer to the individual items for their license information. That being said, this curriculum is shared openly—feel free to use any of these materials (in accordance with their license) including this website.